“All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.”

“Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.”

“For anyone who doesn't have that connection with Mozart, I urge those people to go and find some of his music, because it can quite genuinely make you just glad to be alive.”

“For too long, musicians have been the greatest enemy of music. Their lack of desire to proselytize is a kind of betrayal.”

“I abhor the words 'classical music.' Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.”

“I free-form it, rock n' roll it. I'm a creature of risk, so I don't know how I'm going to explore a Beethoven symphony until I'm doing it.”

“I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!”

“I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart.”

“I most definitely would not buy the 'Daily Mail,' which pours a kind of livid torpor into the eyelids of the average Brit - I skimmed through a copy recently and couldn't believe the rubbish in it.”

“I spend so much of my time working away, but I love being here. My family is in Somerset, and this is where my heart is.”

“I think most people's record collections are more interesting than radio generally gives them credit for. You're likely to be as interested in the Grateful Dead as Palestrina. It pisses me off how compartmentalised music is. I used to be in a punk band, you know?”

“I'm a bit of a Luddite, really: I don't use email much, as I started drowning in it. So I said 'screw this' and dumped my laptop, though I've begun to re-engage with it.”

“I'm always up for music shows such as Jools Holland, but news more than anything, particularly Newsnight. And cookery: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein - it's down to him that I cook fish so much - and the great food alchemist Heston Blumenthal.”

“Most people in the Western world grow up with the received wisdom that Mozart was a genius. But few people necessarily know why. More than anyone else, he captured this something which is the human condition, the fine line that we all constantly dance between joy and pain, between absolute happiness and absolute heartbreak.”

“Mozart, Beethoven - how can you not want to share them with everyone and anyone? This stuff is of as great importance as the food we eat and the air we breathe.”

“Music is a lens through which to see who we are. Every phrase of every piece of music is trying to tell a story.”

“Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.”

“Our pop scene is among the best in the world because there are 300 languages spoken on the streets of London, compared with 200 in New York. Our diversity is our strength.”

“Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.”

“People like Aphex Twin, Jason Pierce, Jarvis Cocker and William Orbit are actively showing their interest in a wider field of music. Jarvis and I met on a benefit for an extraordinary man called LaMonte Young, the father of minimalism, who worked with John Cale and shared a loft with Yoko Ono.”

“Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.”

“Somerset is the first proper country county you come to in the West, which isn't dependent on London and isn't full of commuters. Somerset is full of the most fantastically interesting people.”

“The rest of my family are obsessed by 'The X Factor:' I'm intrigued by it, although its musical values are far away from mine, like a cup of tea with 400 lumps of sugar in it. There's something very strange about Simon Cowell's lips, isn't there?”

“The way Fatboy Slim layers motifs is the same as 18th-century baroque counterpoint. You have an idea, then you have an answer to the idea in another voice, then you have a counter idea accompanying the original idea, and you build up your texture like that. I'm really into Kruder and Dorfmeister at the moment, and they do the same thing.”

“There's always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!”

“When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.”